by Joss Wood
Troy frowned, worried. “Which is?”
“It’s bad, Troy.”
Troy swore and Rory knew his disappointment and concern would be shared by most of the residents of Vancouver, Mavericks and Canucks fans alike. Mac was a hell of a player and respected for his leadership and skill. Maverick fans would be devastated to lose their captain for a couple of matches. To lose him for the season would be a disaster. Losing him forever would be a tragedy. But she’d treated enough sport stars to know the impact of his injury, both physical and emotional, would be tremendous.
“How did the surgery go?” Rory asked Troy.
“Good.” Troy cleared his throat. “We really could get fired, Rorks. Even though I know the voodoo blanket helps, it’s still a form of treatment and you’re not authorized. I like my job.”
Rory knew he was right, but she still rolled her eyes at her best friend. “As I’ve explained to you a million times before, the blanket is not voodoo! It sends electromagnetic signals that stimulate the pumping of the smallest blood vessels. It will help normalize the circulation in this injured area. Kade asked me to be here. He’ll work it out. It’ll be okay, Troy.”
When Troy narrowed his bright green eyes, Rory looked away. “This will run for the next thirty minutes,” she said. “Why don’t you go get some coffee?”
She needed to be alone with Mac, to get her thoughts—and her reaction to him—under control.
“Ok, I’ll be back in thirty.”
Troy sent her a worried smile and left the room. When the door closed behind him, she turned back to Mac and couldn’t resist the impulse to place her hand on his chest, directly over his heart. Under the thin cotton of the hospital gown she felt the warmth of his skin.
She kept her hand there, trying not to wish she could run it over his hard stomach, down the thick biceps of his uninjured arm. He was so big, his body a testament to a lifetime dedicated to professional sports, to being the hardest, toughest, fastest player on the ice.
She glanced toward the end of the bed at his chart. Reading the chicken scrawl again wouldn’t change a damn thing. Essentially, Mac had pulled a tendon partly off the bone and injured a ligament. The surgeons doubted he’d regain his former strength anytime soon, if ever.
That would kill him. Even in the short time they’d known each other, she’d understood that hockey was what Mac did, who he was. He’d dedicated the last fourteen years to the Mavericks. He was their star player, their leader, the reason fans filled the arena week after week. He was their hope, their idol, the public face of the well-oiled machine Kade managed.
With his crooked smile, his aloof but charming manner and incredible prowess on the ice, he was the city’s favorite, regularly appearing in the press, usually with a leggy blonde on his arm. Speculating about when one of the Mavericks Triumvirate—Mac, their captain, Kade as CEO and Quinn as Acting Coach (the youngest in the NHL but widely respected) were all hot and single—would fall in love and settle down was a citywide pastime.
A part of him belonged to the city but Rory doubted that anyone, besides his best friends, knew him. From that time so long ago she knew that Mac, for all his charm, was a closed book. Very little was known about his life before he was recruited to play for the Mavericks. Even Shay hadn’t known more than what was public knowledge: he was raised by a single mother who died when he was nineteen, he was a scholarship kid and he didn’t talk about his past.
They had that in common. Rory didn’t talk about her past either.
Rory adjusted the settings on the control box and Mac shifted in his sleep, releasing a small pain-filled moan. He would hate to know that she’d heard him, she thought. Mac, she remembered, had loathed being sick. He’d played with a broken finger, flu, a sprained ankle, a hurt knee. He’d play through plagues of locusts and an asteroid strike.
Rory looked at his injured arm and sighed. He wouldn’t be able to play through this. How was she supposed to tell Kade that?
A big, hot hand touched her throat and a thumb stroked her jaw. Her brain shut down when he touched her and, just like she had in Shay’s kitchen, she couldn’t help responding. She allowed her head to snuggle into his hand as he slowly opened his eyes and focused on her face. His fabulous eyes, the deep, dark blue of old-fashioned bottled ink, met hers.
“Hey,” he croaked.
“Hey back,” Rory whispered, her fingers digging into the skin on his chest. She should remove herself but, once again, she stayed exactly where she was.
So nothing much had changed then. She hadn’t grown up at all.
“They must have given me some powerful drugs because you seem so damn real.”
Rory shuddered as his thumb brushed over her bottom lip. He thought he was imagining her, she realized.
“Helluva dream... God, you’re so beautiful.” Mac’s hand drifted down her throat over her collarbone. His fingers trailed above the cotton of her tunic to rest on the slight swell of her breast. His eyes, confused and pain-filled, stayed on her face, tracing her features and drinking her in.
Then he heaved in a sigh and the blue deepened to midnight. “My arm is on fire.”
“I know, Mac.” Rory touched his hair, then his cheek, and her heart double-tapped when he turned his face into her palm, as if seeking comfort. She tried to pull her hand away but Mac slapped his hand on hers to keep her palm against his cheek. Everyone, even the big, bold Mac, needed support, a human connection. At the moment she was his.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?”
What should she say? She didn’t want to lie to him, but she had no right to talk to him about his injuries. She shouldn’t even be here. “You’ll be okay, Mac. No matter what, you’ll be okay.”
Pain—the deep, dark, emotional kind—jumped into his eyes. His hand moved to her wrist and he pulled her down until her chest rested on his. Her mouth was a quarter inch from his. God, this was so wrong. She shouldn’t be doing this. Despite those thoughts ricocheting through her head she couldn’t help the impulse to feel those lips under hers, to taste him.
Just once to see if the reality measured up to her imagination.
This would be the perfect time, the only time, to find out. She could stop wondering and move the hell past him, past the kiss they’d never shared.
There was no one in the room with them. Nobody would ever know.
His injured state hadn’t affected his skills, Rory thought as he took control of the kiss, tipping her head to achieve the precise angle he wanted. His tongue licked its way into her mouth, nipping here, sliding there. Then their tongues met and electricity rocketed through her as she sank into him.
It was all she’d dreamed about. And a lot more.
Rory had no idea how long the kiss lasted. She was yanked back to the present when Mac hissed in pain. Stupid girl! He’d had surgery only hours before! He was in a world of hurt. Mac, she noticed, just lay there, his hand on her thigh and his eyes closed. He was so still. Had he fallen back to sleep? Rory looked down at his big tanned hand and licked her top lip, tasting him there.
It had been just two mouths meeting, tongues dancing, but his kisses could move mountains, part seas, redesign constellations. It had been that powerful. Kissing Mac was an out-of-body experience.
The universe knew what it was doing by keeping them apart. She wasn’t looking for a man and she certainly wasn’t looking for a man like Mac. Too big, too bold, too confident. A celebrity who had never heard of the word monogamy.
He was exactly what she didn’t need. Unfaithful. She was perfectly content to fly solo, she reminded herself.
The machine beeped to tell her the program had ended, and Rory started to stand up. The hand squeezing her thigh kept her in place. When she looked at Mac, his eyes were still closed but the corners of his mouth kicked up into a cocky smile.
“Best drea
m ever,” he said before slipping back into sleep.
Two
He’d been dreaming of Rory, something he hadn’t done in years, Mac realized as he surfaced out of a pain-saturated sleep. She’d been sitting cross-legged on his bed, her silver-gray eyes dancing. Wide smile, firm breasts, golden-brown hair that was so long, he remembered, that it flirted with her butt...five foot three of petite perfection.
In his dream he’d been French-kissing her and it had felt...man...amazing! Slow, hot, sexy—what a kiss should really be. Okay, he’d had far too many drugs if he was obsessing about a girl he’d wanted to kiss a lifetime ago. Mac shoved his left hand through his hair before pushing himself up using the same hand, trying but failing to ignore the slamming pain in his other arm as he moved.
This was bad. This was very, very bad.
Half lying, half sitting, he closed his eyes and fought the nausea gathering in his throat. Dimly aware of people entering his private hospital room, he fought the pain, pushed down the nausea and concentrated on those silver eyes he’d seen in his dream. The way her soft lips felt under his...
He had been dreaming, right?
“Do you need something for the pain, Mr. McCaskill?”
Mac jerked fully awake and looked into the concerned face of a guy a few years younger than him.
“I’m Troy Hunter, your nurse,” he said. “So, some meds? You’re due.”
“Hell yes,” Mac muttered. He usually hated drugs but he slowly rolled onto his good side, presenting his butt to be jabbed as Kade and Quinn walked into the room. “Hey, guys.”
Troy glanced at Mac’s visitors with his mouth dropped open, looking like any other fan did when the three of them were together...awestruck.
Tall and rock solid, in both stature and personality, Mac wasn’t surprised to see Kade and Quinn and so soon after his surgery. They were his friends, his onetime roommates, his colleagues...his family. They were, in every way that counted, his brothers.
After giving him the injection, Troy pulled up Mac’s shorts and stood back to look at him, his face and tone utterly professional. “Let’s get you sorted out. I need to do my boring nurse stuff and then I’ll leave you to talk.” He looked more closely at Mac. “You look uncomfortable.”
Mac nodded. He was half lying and half sitting but the thought of moving made him break out in a cold sweat. “Yeah, I am.”
“I can remedy that.” Troy, with surprising ease and gentleness for a man who was six-three and solid, maneuvered Mac into a position he could live with. While Troy wound a blood pressure cuff around Mac’s arm, Kade sat down in the chair on the opposite side of the bed, his expression serious.
“We would appreciate your discretion as to Mac’s condition,” he told Troy. That voice, not often employed, usually had sponsors, players and random citizens scattering.
Troy, to his credit, didn’t look intimidated. “I don’t talk about my patients. Ever.”
Kade stared at Troy for a long time before nodding once. “Thank you.”
They waited in silence until Troy left the room and then Kade turned to him and let out a stream of profanity.
Here it comes, Mac thought, resigned.
“What were you thinking, trying to move that fridge yourself? One call and one of us would’ve been there to help you!”
Mac shrugged. “It wasn’t that heavy. It started to fall and I tried to catch it.”
“Why the hell can’t you just ask for help?” Quinn demanded. “It’s serious, Mac, career-ending serious.”
Mac felt the blood in his face drain away. When he could speak, he pushed the words out between dry lips. “That bad, huh?”
Kade looked as white as Mac imagined himself to be. “That bad.”
“Physiotherapy?” Mac demanded.
“An outside chance at best,” Quinn answered him. He didn’t sugarcoat his words, and Mac appreciated it. He needed the truth.
Kade spoke again. “We’ve found someone to work with you. She’s reputed to be the best at sports rehabilitation injuries.”
Neither of his friends met his eyes, and his heart sank to his toes. He knew that look, knew that he wouldn’t like what was coming next.
“Who? Nurse Ratched?” he joked.
“Rory Kydd,” Kade told him, his face impassive.
“Rory? What?” he croaked, not liking the frantic note in his voice. It was bad enough seeing Rory in his dreams but being her patient would mean hitting the seventh level of hell.
There was a reason why he never thought of her, why he’d obliterated that day from his memory. He’d publicly humiliated himself and the world had seen him at his worst. Rory’d had a front-row seat to the behind-the-scenes action.
Saying what he had on that open mic had been bad enough but almost kissing his about-to-be ex’s sister was unforgiveable. At the time he’d been thinking of Rory a lot, had been, strangely, attracted to Shay’s petite but feisty younger sister. But he should never have caged her in, tempting them both. He knew better than to act on those kinds of feelings, even if his relationship with Shay had been sliding downhill.
His mother’s many messy affairs had taught him to keep his own liaisons clean, to remove himself from one situation before jumping into another. He’d forgotten those lessons the moment Rory looked at him with her wide, lust-filled eyes. His big brain shut down as his little brain perked up...
In the months afterward he hadn’t missed Shay—too needy, too insecure—but he had missed talking to, teasing, laughing with Rory. She’d been, before he mucked it up, his first real female friend.
That day he’d also unwittingly created a media superstorm and a public persona for himself. He’d been branded a player, a party-hard, commitment-phobic prick whose two objectives in life were to play with a puck and to chase skirts.
They had it half right...
Yes, he liked the occasional party and was commitment-phobic. Yes, he loved to play with a puck and yeah, he had sex, but not as much or with as many woman as was suggested in the tabloids. These days he was a great deal more discriminating about who he took into his bed, and it had been a couple of months since he’d been laid.
He looked down at his arm and scowled. It seemed like it would be a few more.
Quinn gripped the railing at the end of the bed with his massive hands. “Rory is the best and God knows you need the best. We need her because everything we’ve worked toward for the past five years is about to slip from our fingers because you were too pigheaded to ask for help!”
Kade frowned at their hotheaded friend. “Take it easy, Quinn. It wasn’t like he did it on purpose.”
No, but it was his fault. Mac tipped his head up to look at the ceiling. He’d failed again today, failed his team, his friends, his future.
And it looked like, once again, Rory would be there to witness it.
There had to be another option. “Find someone else! Anyone else!”
“Don’t be a moron!” Quinn told him.
Kade, always the voice of reason, stepped between them before they started to yell. “You’ll work with her while we do damage control on our end.”
Mac rested his head on his pillow, feeling the sedative effects of whatever the nurse had stuck in him. Ignoring the approaching grogginess, he sucked in some deep breaths and forced his brain to work.
Dammit, why did Vernon Hasselback have to die before they’d concluded the deal they’d all been discussing for the past decade? It was a simple plan: when the time was right he and Kade and Quinn would buy the franchise from Vernon. They’d been working toward this since they were all rookie players and they’d hammered out a detailed plan to raise the cash, which included using their player fees and endorsement money to invest in business opportunities to fund their future purchase of the franchise. The strategy had
worked well. Within a decade they had a rock-solid asset base and were, by anyone’s standards, ridiculously wealthy. Money wasn’t an issue. They could buy the franchise without breaking much of a sweat. But to take the team and its brand to the next level they needed a partner who brought certain skills to the table. Someone who had bigger and better connections in all facets of the media, who could open the doors to mega-sponsorship deals, who had merchandising experience.
Unfortunately, because Vernon died in the bed of his latest mistress, his widow and the beneficiary of his entire estate wasn’t inclined to honor his wishes about passing the mantle on to the three of them. Myra wanted to sell the franchise to a Russian billionaire who’d acquired six sports teams in the past two years and was rebranding them to be generic, cardboard cutouts of the teams they once were and mouthpieces for his bland corporation. Kade had convinced Myra to give them some time but they knew she was impulsive and impatient. She would use any setback as an excuse to sell the franchise out from under them, and Mac’s injury was a very big setback.
“No one can know how badly I’m injured.”
Kade and Quinn nodded. “I’m very aware of that,” Kade said. “I also have a potential investor on the hook. He’s a loaded Mavericks fan, meets all our requirements and runs a massive media empire so nothing can jeopardize our negotiations. You are one of the reasons he wants to buy the team. He knows you only have a few more years left at this level and he wants you to spend that time mentoring the rookie talent.”
So, no additional pressure then. Mac pushed the drowsiness away. “So I have to start playing with his team when the season opens.”
“Essentially,” Quinn replied, blowing air into his cheeks. “If not sooner.”
Mac clenched his jaw in determination. It was the same attitude that had won the team the Stanley Cup two years ago, that had taken him from being just another rookie to one of the most exciting players of his generation. When he decided he was going to do something, achieve something, win something, nothing and nobody got in his way.